Re: Re: DDDA / Docklands Miscellany
@lostexpectation wrote:
who designated the bay an spa it wasn’t the objectors
dunno, someone with a very narrow focus I imagine.
There were two articles on the DDDA/Liam Carroll cozy-up in the Business This Week section of the Irish Times on Friday, and both attempted to shed light on the infamous ‘secret deal’ and the motivation behind it, but neither article made the connection with the ”Liffey Island” wheeze which is surely central to this whole thing.
The former DDDA guy keeps trying to explain this story as a deal he did with Carroll to deliver a slice of public amenity space. This is the same public amenity space – the strip with the odd, canal-like, water feature in it – that we became aquainted with on these boards some time ago [and struggled to find any merit in].
”It was a genuine attempt by the executive [of the DDDA] to ensure that land earmarked for community parks [by the DDDA] would be handed over by developers . . .” Paul Maloney, former chief executive of the DDDA, is reported as saying
But that proposed new linear strip with the ‘canal’ [the community park?] was always just the sop that they were intending to claim justified usurping the North Wall campshire and the adjacent area of riverbed for commercial development despite it’s clear and obvious amenity value, ‘open space’ zoning, and intrinsic value as a piece of Dublin quayside.
I don’t know what other people think, but, if I was Liam Carroll and I was developing a new corporate office block on an absolutely prime, high profile, quay-frontage site, the only way I’d even contemplate letting the quayside in front of me become hijacked for a rival commercial development, in contravention of the existing zoning objective, is if I had a helluva secret deal in the bag.
I’m not a cut-throat property developer, but if I was, I doubt I’d be satisfied with just a vague indication that some time in the future the DDDA might see their way to granting planning permission for a few more storeys on top of my – no longer river-front – office block :rolleyes:
